up vote 0 down vote favorite

Noob. Sorry :-(

I have a keystore file that I'm confident represents an account I'd like to retain/use. It's unclear how I can recreate (or reinstantiate) this account within a fresh Ethereum (node) deployment.

I'd like to reuse this because I used it with the Rinkeby faucet to request some Ether.

I thought I should be able to use 'geth account import' but:

Fatal: Failed to load the private key: encoding/hex: invalid byte: U+007B '{'

The account begins : 3df6... and I have the password ;-)

The keystore file is JSON:

{
  "address": "3df6...",
  "crypto": {
    "cipher": "aes-128-ctr",
    "ciphertext": "...",
    "cipherparams": {
      "iv": "..."
    },
    "kdf": "scrypt",
    "kdfparams": {
      "dklen": 32,
      "n": 262144,
      "p": 1,
      "r": 8,
      "salt": "..."
    },
    "mac": "..."
  },
  "id": "..",
  "version": 3
}

I would appreciate guidance on how I may recreate it. I assume success would be, from within the console being able to see this account enumerate by personal.

Or am I missing something(s)?

OK, progress:

docker run \
--rm \
--interactive \
--net=host \
--tty \
--volume=$PWD/data-dir:/root \
--volume=$PWD/backups/.rinkeby/keystore:/keystore \
ethereum/client-go \
  --datadir=/root/.rinkeby \
  --keystore=/keystore \
  account list
INFO [05-22|21:38:35] Maximum peer count                       ETH=25 LES=0 total=25
Account #0: {3df6...} keystore:///keystore/TC--2018-00-00T00-00-00.000000000Z--3df6...

That's the account and it appears to be legitimate so, my new question is how do I import this so that I may use it when attaching this console to my node?

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up vote 1 down vote accepted

geth account import is for raw private keys. To use a wallet file, simply copy it into your keystone directory and it should appear with geth account list

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  • Your suggestion was successful in my 'progress' update above accessing the account through a single, local node. I'll copy the file onto my remote node as you suggest. Thank you! – DazWilkin May 23 at 14:59
  • It worked! Thank you. Though I've encountered another issue where, if I represent the wallet (which I assume can/ought be treated as read-only) as a Kubernetes (!) volume mount of a Secret or ConfigMap (best practice), the node does not appear to detect the wallet which--I believe--is indicated by the presence|absence of the log entry Etherbase automatically configured. If instead of a Secret or ConfigMap, I use a regular disk and volume mount this, everything works :-( – DazWilkin May 23 at 23:23
  • If you post this as a separate question, someone who knows more about kubernetes might be able to help – Tjaden Hess♦ May 24 at 19:14
  • I think there's a bug in geth and I created a workaround: github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/issues/16793 – DazWilkin May 25 at 19:21

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